S publishes peer-reviewed essays on Lacanian and related topics from the fields of art, film and literary criticism, political, philosophical and ideological critique. S also re-publishes hard to obtain essays and translations from seminal thinkers in Lacanian studies whose work deserves the worldwide dissemination open access publishing affords.

Forthcoming issue: Capitalism and Psychoanalysis

In an unpublished article written for the French newspaper Le Monde on the heels of the events of May 1968, Jacques Lacan noted that the “abundance of objects” offered to us by consumer society “do not fill up the fateful object a.” These words allow us to measure the difficulty that capitalism poses, both to psychoanalytic practice and theory and to each of us, in the most intimate aspects of our everyday lives.

The gap between the consumer object and the object theorized by psychoanalysis would push Lacan towards new formulations, including the writing of the capitalism as a discourse. It also points to other gaps, which we never cease to confront: that, for example, between the divided subject and homo œconomicus, the position that capitalist practice commands us to assume. The latter, indeed, gives body to a conception of satisfaction that is sometimes radically at odds with the psychoanalytic one. What is the result of these fundamental differences? Is the ciphering of the unconscious, for example, obstructed by the requirements of homo eœconomicus? Can Lacan’s conception of the identification with the symptom teach us something about how to respond to our current discontents?